Top 6 Quotes & Sayings by Sylvia Plachy

What makes you push the shutter has to do with seeking a kind of perfection, a harmony in the world. You are instinctively aware it's there, but you've got to be completely alert and quick and so deeply awake that it moves you.

Every photo is almost a fiction or a dream. If it's really good, it's another form of life.

The work of the artist is not so much what you say or what you know, it's recognizing what you know. That's what life is about. That's what photography is about. You see something, or you hear someone say something, and you say That is a truth. You know, deep in you. That's when you start shooting.

As a relentless gatherer of moments, I find that my favorite images, although grounded in the present, are like spirits shaped by memories. They whisper of fairy tales, poetry, and other lives, as each gesture connects with another and raises yet another from the dead. Shadows flicker on film to an inner melody as I navigate, camera at hand and at the speed of light, through unimaginable worlds - desperately trying to make sense of the joy and suffering before it all disappears.

You find photographs in so many different ways - from chance encounters, from looking at your negatives, from the way the light hits your pillow in your home, from a sound or a movement that makes you look... It’s whatever draws you or makes you feel something. Then, the picture is only good if it has a life of its own. Every photo is almost a fiction or a dream. If it’s really good, it’s another form of life.

Stop and go: always on some journey. My bounty is a photograph or two.